[NHFunkii]

Jeff,
You could take that a step further and say 'he only has one hand at any given time, so just use your intuition and figure out what it is, and make the appropriate play.' The point is, you have to weight the estimated probability of him doing this with a lot of hands vs doing it only with AA/KK or whatever. yeah intuition is great if you can figure out exactly what he has in any given hand - then shania/hand ranges are worthless - but that's kinda hard.

there's two definitions for probability: the bayesian one and the frequentist one. A frequentist might say that he's only doing this one time and so 'probability' is irrelevant, you just have to guess whether he's doing it with air or whether he isn't, which is pretty close to what you're saying I think. That's not so helpful though. He also might say 'from ike's perspective, he has certain evidence and thoughts about the flow of the game, and in situations in which he has the same evidence, if repeated over and over again, he will make this play with air a certain % of the time, so we should base our play on that'. But that doesn't really make sense, because Ike will never have the same evidence, and you can't repeat it over and over again.

What I think is most useful for poker, is looking at probability from the bayesian perspective; probability is a totally subjective measure of your confidence level that he will be making the play with air. Yes, at any given time he may not be thinking about 'I'm doing this x% of the time, because that exploits him, or that's unexploitable', but you definitely aren't 100% confident that he always makes this play with air, or never makes this play with air, so you have to use all the evidence you have about the current state, and the estimated prior probability of him making this play with air, come up with a subjective number of how often you thinks he does it, and act accordingly.

that said, I agree that posting this hand probably isn't that helpful, because guessing at the probability of how often he makes this move is very difficult if you're not watching the flow of the game (and presumably also difficult if you are). But you can't just say 'use intuition' and ignore the math aspect. Intuition is math.